It’s hard to believe that later this year, the season premiere of Telltale Games’ The Wolf Among Us will have its 10th anniversary. Unfortunately, its highly anticipated sequel won’t arrive in time to share in the celebration as it was announced today that it will not arrive in 2023.

Jamie Ottley, Telltale Games’ CEO, broke the news to IGN saying “Making games is difficult and they need time to be right…And it doesn’t do any of us any good to ship something that’s not ready.” This was a major problem that plagued Telltale in its original incarnation as it felt like every other week there was a new product of theirs on digital storefronts from brands like The Walking Dead, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones and Borderlands. These were more often than not followed by videos of glitches and threads about crashes and other bugs.

With so many projects in development throughout the last decade, this led to excessive crunch at the studio, something that Ottley wishes to avoid. “I’ve done [crunch], and I don’t want to do it again, and it’s not fair to ask it,” adding “You can’t plan a business around it. So yeah, part of it is about maintaining a healthy work culture. We don’t want to burn out our good people. It has been incredibly difficult to recruit the last two years between COVID and the labor markets and the growth in the games industry. So certainly, burning people out or grinding them down is the wrong thing to do long-term. It’s not how you build a business. And as an industry, we’re terrible about it. We burn our people out. We burn our best people out faster. And as an industry, if we’re going to continue to grow, we have to stop it. We just have to stop doing it and make better choices.”

The Wolf Among Us 2 was in development at Telltale 1.0 before they closed their doors in the fall of 2018. A year late at the Game Awards, a trailer signaled to the world that the game was resurrected at the reborn Telltale Games. In that time, little news has come out about the sequel and the anticipation for it is high given the reception to the original The Wolf Among Us. Ottley knows, however, that it’s important not to fall into the trap that the original Telltale found themselves in.

“If we put this game out and it’s not ready, we’re going to get torn to shreds,” further stating “The expectations are pretty high, and we want time to meet those and we want to be proud of it and know that, ‘Hey, this is the best game we could have made.’ Let the world say what they will [once] it’s done, but at least we know that in these times, in these conditions, this is the best game that we could make.”

VIA IGN